Fire TV Edition televisions come with Alexa voice remotes

Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick owners will feel right at home with the remote that comes with the Fire TV Edition televisions from Westinghouse, Seiki, and Element. That’s because the remote is nearly identical to the Alexa remote that comes with Amazon’s streaming devices. I would even go as far as to guess that Amazon even manufactured the remotes, or at least the pre-production versions being used to control the TVs at CES.

Apart from having different logos on them, the remotes for all three brands of TV are the same. The remote is the same shape and feel as the Fire TV voice remote. The main difference is the TV remotes come with a power button on top and volume up/down buttons at the bottom. The remote is also slightly longer than the one that comes with the Fire TV.

The other difference is that the back, home, and menu buttons have been moved above the circular directional ring. It’s a minor change, but I actually really like it because it makes it slightly easier to go from the directional ring to the back button, which is something you do quite often with the remote.

I’m told the remote design may change between now and later this year when the televisions make their way through the production line and into stores.

Great book. I read it before Amazon existed or I would have bought it from Amazon. That said, Amazon isn’t the government, they aren’t sending all your audio, since they listen locally for the word Alexa, so at most there’s probably a very limited memory cache of recent audio, and the you’re all welcome to come to my family room (bring beer please) and listen to the conversations that happen in there. It’s mostly my 10 year old and 7 year old fighting over what to watch.

And there’s an Echo five feet away, so the stuff’s already being surreptitiously recorded by the government anyway, if you’re into conspiracy theories. :)

I’m a BIG believer in consumer privacy rights, but also a big believer in our rights to give up some privacy if we choose in exchange for a perceived benefit.

Both of my FireTV gen1 boxes have issues with phantom presses from the remote. Really quite annoying at this point. I had a MiiBox for a month to try it out, eventually I returned it because the lack of additional buttons. I do feel that remote felt much nicer. Have a FireTV 2 that I’m still too lazy to unbox and put into production so I don’t know if they’ve fixed the cheap feel of the remotes.